Amazon has announced the public preview of Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based operating system that is purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket can run on virtual machines as well as bare metal hosts.

Bottlerocket is a minimal Linux distribution that is aimed at the same market as Google’s container-optimized operating system. Amazon says Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. The intention is that the minimal software will let users use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, resulting in better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost. At the moment Bottlerocket can be test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 and with Amazon EKS.

Amazon says that most containers are run on general-purpose operating systems that can support applications packaged in a variety of formats, including containers. Updates to these general-purpose systems are applied on a package-by-package basis, and the complex dependencies among their packages can result in errors. This makes it hard to automate updating. By contrast, updates to Bottlerocket can be applied and rolled back in a single step which makes them easy to automate.The update process is based on an open-source project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The Update Framework relies on the use of two identical partitions. Updates are applied to the inactive partition, and once the update is complete, the inactive and active partitions are swapped. If the updated partition doesn't boot, the partitions are swapped back. The single-step updates also improve uptime for container applications by minimizing update failures and enabling easy update rollbacks. Additionally, Bottlerocket includes only the essential software to run containers, which improves resource usage and reduces the attack surface.

Bottlerocket is developed as an open source project on GitHub, and AWS-provided builds of Bottlerocket are covered under AWS Support plans.

More Information

BottleRocket On GitHub

BottleRocket On AWS

Related Articles

Kubernetes for Full-Stack Developers

Google Promotes ChromeOS at Google I/O

Docker Comes To Pi - It's Official

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

{laodposition comment}